Egyptian Court Rejects Verdict Against Mubarak

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Supporters of Hosni Mubarak, the imprisoned former president of Egypt whose guilty verdict and life sentence were overturned by a court on Sunday, celebrated the ruling in Cairo.CreditCreditMohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters

CAIRO — An Egyptian appeals court on Sunday threw out the guilty verdict and life sentence against former President Hosni Mubarak on charges that he allowed the killing of protesters. The court ordered a new trial, which would once again send the ailing autocrat rolling on a stretcher into the steel defendant’s cage in an Egyptian criminal court.

Whether this was a victory or a setback for Mr. Mubarak was confused and contested. Both the prosecution and the defense had appealed the verdict, one side seeking a stronger verdict and the other an acquittal. Lawyers for the Islamist party allied with President Mohamed Morsi argued that a new trial with new evidence could yield a death penalty.

But other Egyptians reacted to the decision with exasperated sighs, seeing a parable of the country’s fitful progress in its struggle to break free of its autocratic past.

“Oh my God, we went back to square one, back to the early days of the revolution two years ago, when people were first calling for a Mubarak trial,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University of Cairo.

Mr. Mubarak’s unending case, he said, reflects Egypt’s unfinished revolution, in which a leader of the old Islamist opposition has come to preside uneasily over the largely still intact institutions of Mr. Mubarak’s former government, including the courts and the police.

“You are fighting Mubarak with his laws and his men,” Mr. Shahin said.

With a parliamentary election set for April, the new trial appeared certain to revive the calls for justice and revenge that once animated the uprising against Mr. Mubarak. Among Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters, the renewed attention to the case played into their depiction of an epic struggle between Egypt’s newly elected leaders and the vestiges of the old state.

“God’s will was for the trial to be redone under Morsi, with the availability of new evidence and new defendants,” Essam el-Erian, a senior leader of President Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, said in a statement.

Mr. Mubarak, 84, spent Sunday night in a military hospital, where he has been transferred repeatedly from his prison cell because of a host of reported health problems, some resulting from falls in the prison bathroom. At one point last year, the official Egyptian state news agency erroneously reported that he was “clinically dead” from a stroke. His first trial was conducted under the rule of the generals who seized power at his ouster, and have since ceded authority to Mr. Morsi.

More than 800 civilian demonstrators were killed, many of them by police and security forces, during the three weeks of mostly nonviolent protests that ended Mr. Mubarak’s rule. When the transitional government pursued charges against Mr. Mubarak and his circle, human rights lawyers faulted the prosecutors for relying on the same police force accused of killing the protesters to collect evidence against itself. And during Mr. Mubarak’s trial, many accused the prosecutors of failing to make good use of the evidence they did gather.

The guilty verdict was considered ripe for appeal from the moment it was issued, because the judge who handed it down said at the time that he had seen no evidence to back up a conviction. Instead, the judge reasoned that Mr. Mubarak and his Interior Ministry bore responsibility for the deaths of the protesters by virtue of their positions; he acquitted a half-dozen subordinate Interior Ministry officials who were charged in the same case.

Under Egyptian law, the ruling on Sunday effectively rewinds the court proceedings to the original indictment of Mr. Mubarak in 2011. When the case is assigned to a new court, the judge will have broad latitude and can send the case back to prosecutors for further investigation and new evidence, or even amend the charges.

Evidently anticipating Sunday’s ruling, Egyptian prosecutors recently had begun a new case against Mr. Mubarak, accusing him of taking payoffs from the state news organization Al Ahram in the form of $1 million in gifts over the last six years of his rule. The prosecutors issued an order on Saturday that would allow them to go on detaining Mr. Mubarak for questioning in that matter even if the court threw out his conviction in the protesters’ deaths.

But on Sunday, the state media reported that Mr. Mubarak and his family had unexpectedly agreed to repay $3 million in gifts he and they had received from Al Ahram in order to resolve the charges. If the repayment is accepted, the judge who hears the retrial could decide whether Mr. Mubarak remains in prison or goes free in the interim.

On the other side, lawyers with Mr. Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party and other advocates of a stronger conviction said they hoped that in a retrial, the prosecutors would take advantage of the findings of a presidential fact-finding commission looking into the protesters’ deaths.

The commission’s findings have not been disclosed publicly, but they reportedly include evidence that Mr. Mubarak was fully aware of the brutal tactics his police were using against protesters, something he denied in the first trial. Members of the commission have said that Mr. Mubarak received “firsthand” reports and watched the street battles around Tahrir Square on a video monitor in his office as they happened.

Ali al-Gineidy, a former member of the commission, said in an interview that Habib el-Adly, Mr. Mubarak’s interior minister, told the panel that “Mubarak knew everything, big and small.” Mr. Adly did not testify in the first trial, and it was unclear whether he would in the second.

So far, no credible reports about the commission’s findings have said that it found any evidence that Mr. Mubarak ordered or directed the use of deadly force against the protesters, the most serious accusation against him.

The commission’s findings could help make a retrial more credible, said Hossam Bahgat, the executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which has tracked the case.

“For the second trial to be more serious at all is going to require more rigorous investigation, and that can’t be done by the same police force,” Mr. Bahgat said, adding that if the second trial sticks to the same evidence as the first, it will almost certainly result in acquittal.

Before the court’s decision on Sunday, Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Adly were the only defendants to be convicted of any responsibility for the killing of the protesters, Mr. Bahgat noted. At least 93 police officers or Interior Ministry officials have been acquitted.

Mayy el Sheikh contributed reporting.

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